THE story of “Bonnie and Clyde” has been told so many times that it has acquired the patina of legend. It’s the kind of historical fable that circulates to explain how the world once was and how it came to be the way it is now: a morality tale in which the wild energies of youth defeat the stale certainties of age, and freedom triumphs over repression.

I’m not talking about the adventures of the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who robbed and shot their way through Texas, Oklahoma and adjacent states in the bad old days of the Great Depression. Their exploits have been chronicled in books, ballads and motion pictures, never more famously than in the movie named after them, which first opened in New York 40 years ago this month. The notoriety of “Bonnie and Clyde,” directed by Arthur Penn from a long-gestating script by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty, who also played Clyde, has long since eclipsed that of its real-life models.

The ups and downs of the movie’s early fortunes have become a touchstone and a parable, a crucial episode in the entwined histories of Hollywood, American film criticism and postmodern popular culture. “Bonnie and Clyde” was a scandal and a sensation largely because it seemed to introduce a new kind of violence into movies. Its brutality was raw and immediate, yet at the same time its scenes of mayhem were choreographed with a formal panache that was almost gleeful.

Their horror was undercut by jaunty, rambunctious humor and by the skittering banjo music of the soundtrack. The final shootout, in which Mr. Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s bodies twitch and writhe amid a storm of gunfire (not long after their characters have successfully made love for the first time), was both awful and ecstatic, an orgy of blood and bullets. The filmmakers seemed less interested in the moral weight of violence than in its aesthetic impact. The killings were alluring and gruesome; that the movie was so much fun may well have been the most disturbing thing about it.

As we endure another phase in the never-ending argument about movie violence — renewed by the recent popularity of extremely brutal horror films like the “Saw” and “Hostel” cycles; made momentarily acute by the Virginia Tech massacre last spring; forever hovering around the edges of dinner-table conversations and political campaigns — it’s worth re-examining this legend to see if it has anything left to teach us.

“Bonnie and Clyde” had its North American premiere on Aug. 4, 1967, at the Montreal film festival. When it opened in New York a short time later, the initial critical reception ranged from dismissal to outright execration. Leading the charge was Bosley Crowther, chief film critic of The New York Times, who attacked “Bonnie and Clyde” as “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy.” Crowther’s short, merciless review — the film’s “blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste” — was followed by a Sunday column that made the case at greater length.

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The bloody climax of Bonnie and Clyde left a legacy.Credit
Photofest

The most celebrated, and consequential, brief for the defense was longer still. In more than 9,000 words in the Oct. 21 issue of The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, then a freelance contributor, hailed “Bonnie and Clyde” as “the most excitingly American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ ” which had come out five years earlier. Hardly an unqualified rave (“probably part of the discomfort that people feel about ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ grows out of its compromises and its failures,” she noted), Kael’s article instead made a sustained argument for the film’s status as a cultural event.

“ ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ” she wrote, “brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about. And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or ‘knowing’ group. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture.”

And so “Bonnie and Clyde” was the somewhat improbable vehicle — a period picture made, with some reluctance, by a major movie studio (Warner Brothers) at the insistence of an ambitious young movie star — by which a new mode of expression and a new set of values entered the cultural mainstream. The movie was quickly marked as a battlefield in an epochal struggle: between “the kids” and their stodgy, respectable elders, between the hip and the square.

According to the standard accounts, now duly taught in classrooms and rehearsed around baby-boom Elderhostel campfires, hip triumphed. By the beginning of 1968 the squares had been routed. Time magazine, which had run a dismissive review, put Bonnie and Clyde, as rendered by Robert Rauschenberg, on its Dec. 8 cover, accompanying an essay by Stefan Kanfer called “The New Cinema: Violence ... Sex ... Art.”

Crowther, after 27 years at The Times, retired. His place was taken by Renata Adler, a writer for The New Yorker who was not yet 30. Kael, already a contentious and influential figure in the world of movie criticism, joined the staff of The New Yorker, where for the next quarter-century she would reign as the most imitated and argued-about film reviewer in the English-speaking world. “Bonnie and Clyde” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.

That it won only two — best supporting actress for Estelle Parsons and best cinematography for Burnett Guffey — may have helped to assure its enduring cachet. Too complete a victory would have led to a loss of credibility. Hip is, by definition, an oppositional stance that the embrace of the establishment can only compromise.

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The Wild Bunch (1969).Credit
Everett Collection

The products of the liberal Hollywood establishment — the earnest, socially responsible dramas that Crowther frequently championed and that Kael in particular despised — did not retreat in the face of a generational challenge mounted by “Bonnie and Clyde” (and also, less noisily, by “The Graduate”). The big Oscar winners that year were “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both movies about gray-haired, socially empowered white men whose prejudices are demolished by Sidney Poitier, at the time Hollywood’s all-purpose answer to America’s race problem.

At the height of the ’60s, the solution proposed by those movies — that basically decent men could work toward mutual understanding and respect — might have seemed wishful at best. The Oscar ceremonies took place on April 10, 1968, a week after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The summer before, “Bonnie and Clyde” had opened against a backdrop of rioting in Newark and Detroit. Part of the film’s mythology has been a product of that coincidence. American cities were burning, the war in Vietnam and the protests against it were escalating, and a new revolutionary consciousness was in the air, somehow shared by college students and third-world guerrillas, by artists and the urban poor.

As J. Hoberman notes in “The Dream Life,” his revisionist history of the ’60s and its movies, “ ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ popularized the attitude Tom Wolfe would derisively call ‘Radical Chic.’ ” Its hero and heroine exist in a state of vague solidarity with the poor and destitute — the banks they rob are the real enemies of the people, and they are admired by hard-luck farmers and sharecroppers — but they themselves are much too glamorous to pass as members of the oppressed masses.

They are not fighting injustice so much as they are having fun, enjoying the prerogatives of outlaw fame. They exist in a kind of anarchic utopia where the pursuit of kicks is imagined to be inherently political. In this universe the usual ethical justifications of violent action are stripped away, but the aura of righteousness somehow remains.

When pressed by his brother, Buck, about the killing of a bank employee — “It was him or you, right?” — Clyde mumbles that he had to do it, even though the audience knows there was no real question of self-defense. Later, Bonnie’s humiliation of a Texas ranger is justified because the ranger is such a brutal, reactionary authority figure. His subsequent pursuit of the criminals, in contrast, is treated as sadistic and irrational.

But the Barrow gang’s own sadism is evident when the outlaws kidnap a nervous undertaker and his girlfriend after stealing the man’s car. The couple turns out to be the very embodiment of square: He complains about his hamburger; she reveals that she lied to him about her age. These people are along for the ride, but they just don’t get it.

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Reservoir Dogs (1992).Credit
Miramax Films/Everett Collection

Not Getting It has been, ever since, the accusation leveled against critics of a certain kind of movie violence by its defenders. The easiest way to attack movie violence is to warn of its real-world consequences, to worry that someone will imitate what is seen on screen. The symmetrically literal-minded response is that because violence already exists in the world, refusing to show it in movies would be dishonest.

Neither of these positions quite acknowledges the particularity of cinematic violence, which is not the same as what it depicts. Even the most bloodthirsty moviegoer would be likely to leave a real fusillade like the one at the end of “Bonnie and Clyde” sickened and traumatized, rather than thrilled. The particular charge of that scene, and others like it, is that it tries to push the pretense — the art — as close to trauma as possible and to make the appreciation of that art its point. Missing the point is what marks you as square.

The Hollywood and critical establishments, both of them in the early stages of a generational upheaval, did not miss the point for long. “Bonnie and Clyde” was hardly the first picture to push against the limits of what was conventionally seen as good taste. But it conducted its assault in the name of a higher form of taste, fusing the bravado of youth with the prestige of art. It legitimized the connoisseurship of violence, which does not present itself as an appetite for cheap thrills, but rather as a taste for the finer things.

Thus the geysers of blood at the end of Sam Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch” two years later could be savored for the director’s visual and formal audacity. The unflinching brutalities of ’70s movies like “The Godfather” and “Chinatown” became hallmarks of the honesty and daring of the New Hollywood. (At the same time the harsh, righteous vengeance unleashed in the “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish” movies appalled many of the same critics who dug the radical chic of “Bonnie and Clyde.”)

By the 1990s, as a newer generation of filmmakers began to fetishize the glories of post-“Bonnie and Clyde” American cinema, stylized, tongue-in-cheek violence became a sign of rebellious independence. The ear-slicing sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” seemed like a deliberate attempt to replicate the kind of shock produced by the wildest moments in “Bonnie and Clyde,” but without the pretense of political or social relevance. This year the best-picture Oscar went to “The Departed,” a movie whose jolting, cold-blooded killings occasioned little objection.

And to raise objections at this point is, perhaps, worse than square. It seems philistine. But I can’t escape the feeling that, just as it has become easier since “Bonnie and Clyde” to accept violence in movies, and more acceptable to enjoy it, it has become harder to talk seriously about the ethics and politics of that violence. The link between real and pretend violence has been so completely severed that some of the ability of movies to offer a critical perspective — to elicit thought as well as gasps and chuckles — has been lost. We’ve become pretty comfortable watching the infliction of pain, and quick to laugh it off.

Don’t misunderstand: I still get a kick out of “Bonnie and Clyde,” but it’s accompanied by a twinge of unease, by the suspicion that, in some ways that matter and that have become too easy to dismiss, Bosley Crowther was right.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Two Outlaws, Blasting Holes in the Screen. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe